Grave Encounters 2 (2012)

It's standard operating procedure for a found footage film to pretend to be real, but Grave Encounters 2 goes meta (much like The Human Centipede 2, as loath as I am to bring up that title). The movie opens with a montage of vloggers describing their reaction to Grave Encounters, finishing with an arrogant, egotistical film student who thinks he's going to usher in the next wave of horror. Guess who our main character is? And Grave Encounters 2 turns out to be the documentary he films about Grave Encounters, in which he goes on a search to prove that the first movie was real, after receiving some cryptic pieces of evidence from an anonymous source online.

Here's one lingering question that breaks suspension of disbelief - no matter how badly you want to prove it, if your suspicions tell you that a movie in which everyone visiting a haunted building was killed horrifically after days of psychological torture and an utter inability to escape that building is really real, then why in god's name would you go visit that building in the middle of the night, and do the exact same thing the last (lost) crew did, in order to prove it? Are you really that stupid? What good is your proof gonna do you if you end up just as dead as the last daring adventurers?

Yeah, so there's lots to roll your eyes about in this sequel. First of which is the early montage of our main characters partying, getting drunk and taking drugs. I know, it's one of those things that lends itself to the found footage genre, but seriously, what scenes could be any less interesting? And anyway, it doesn't help to make our characters more sympathetic. (I don't know about you, but I don't think vomiting into a toilet bowl makes somebody "cool" and "relatable"). And if your goal in a horror film is to make us loathe the characters we're going to eventually watch die, so we can sit back and say, "haha, you jackass, you totally deserved that," then I don't really think you're doing horror right.

I'm sorry, but it's just really hard to ignore when your main character is an aspiring director, who goes on about being original, then resorts to making films that rely heavily on cliche. The first Grave Encounters was an excitingly original take on an all-too-familiar premise. The sequel falls rather short of its forebear's legacy. It takes a long time to get to the asylum (that we all know it's headed for), and before getting there, it uses a cheap trick by which all of the best scares from the first movie are recycled by being cut into the footage without warning, being explained away as the other characters reviewing the first movie. But the result is that those scares, taken out of context of the original movie, lose all their atmosphere and are rendered as cheap jump scares.

As for the sequel's own scares, apart from one really cool monster sequence, they're much less effective this time around. Perhaps partly due to the fact that we have a better idea of what to expect, but also due to the way they're filmed. One thing that this movie has going for it is that it builds upon the spacetime anomalies that occur inside the haunted building, which was my favorite aspect of the original. But, unfortunately, even this angle is squandered as the movie begins to veer too far into fantasy, at the cost of its horror atmosphere. There's a really ridiculous floating camera gimmick that's in use toward the end of the film, that ultimately kills the found footage feeling of the film. Which is fascinating, in a way, because when the perspective begins to shift away from the first person POV, you can almost instantly feel yourself being less scared, because you don't feel in the middle of the action so much anymore. But, of course, for the film, doing that doesn't effectively accomplish its objective.

What we're left with, I think, is a disjointed sequel that has a lot of ideas - not half of them half bad - but that ultimately fails to live up to its own boasts, much less the expectations created by the outstanding film it follows.

The Human Centipede II (2011)

I'm not going to make any excuses for watching The Human Centipede II (which should have been called The Human Millipede). After watching the first one, I knew what to expect. But the "meta" nature of the sequel, as described in the synopsis, reeled me in (like a sucker).

Part two is a lot more graphic, and even more disturbing than the first, but it has at least one thing going for it, and that's its smart self-awareness. What is the worst possible thing you could say about the movie The Human Centipede? How about that some lowlife would watch it and want to try it at home? Well, that's the premise of this movie.

The sicko this time around is a bloated, bug-eyed, asthmatic troll of a subhuman who lives with his mother (so, basically, your stereo-typical 4chan poster), and is absolutely obsessed with the movie The Human Centipede, to the point of masturbating (with sandpaper!) to it on repeat. Plus he was psychologically and sexually abused since childhood (although honestly, I don't understand how that's even relevant - it's not like it makes him sympathetic, or his actions any more understandable).

Whereas the doctor in the first movie was a trained surgeon who simply had a twisted view of what constitutes a medical marvel, this guy is an utterly pathetic, homocidal, antisocial pervert who is such a caricature of creepiness that you can't imagine how he would have survived long enough in the real world to carry out his fantasy of stitching together a 12-person human centipede with a hammer, duct tape, and a staple gun.

But yeah, that's kind of the brilliance of it, because it totally emphasizes how ridiculously absurd the premise is, as much as the idea that somebody would a) want to, and b) be able to recreate it after seeing the movie. Maybe some crazy Nazi scientist during WWII, but those were extenuating circumstances that allowed for many inhuman atrocities to be committed. In modern society, the idea that a movie like The Human Centipede should be banned because somebody might enjoy or emulate it is, as I said, as absurd as its premise.

Still, social commentary aside, what we're left with is a fundamentally disturbing movie. I give it props for its stylistic approach, but it's still a movie about a sicko (however fictional he may be) whose only joy in life is shooting innocent people, clubbing them over the head with a crowbar, and then sewing them together ass to mouth.

It makes me wonder why I even watch films like this. I mean, I'm all about the importance of defending free speech, and the worst that speech has to offer is that which is most in need of defending. But there are less distancing ways to push the boundaries than with sadistic, pathological violence.

However, violence remains a far more acceptable dramatic subject than sexuality, and so even bad horror films have more interesting stories than most porn. I just wonder if maybe I'm fueling my own fear of real life violence and medical operations by watching so many overindulgent dramatizations, and that rather than desensitizing me, it is feeding my paranoia and anxiety...